MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood, review

The final part of Margaret Atwood’s sci-fi trilogy is darkly troubling, says Tim
Martin.

In the sylvan post-apocalypse of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam, mankind is all but extinct and dreadful puns roam the Earth. Pursued by psychotic Painballers, the one-time employees of the HelthWyzer corporation join with exiles from the Paradice Dome in the overgrown AnooYoo Spa, sustaining themselves on foraged Choco-Nutrinos and Mo’Hair milk. “Why did he do it?” one wails. “The lethal wipeout virus in the BlyssPluss pills?” “Heart like shale,” another admonishes his lover. “What you need is a good fracking.”

MaddAddam is Atwood’s third visit to the weird world she created in Oryx and Crake, a satire that contrasted the last days of an overripe human society with the fresh horrors of the green Eden that replaced it. Set a quarter-century after a global plague, the narrative of Oryx and Crake skipped between the pre-catastrophe world, a Caligulan nightmare of pornography, fast food and science-for-profit, and its successor, a dystopian jungle roamed by GM monster pigs, sorrowful human survivors and the Crakers, singing blue post-people with the brains of a chickpea.

When Oryx and Crake was published, Atwood claimed not to be writing science fiction, which was, she contended, all “monsters and spaceships”, but speculative fiction, which “could really happen”. Since her book appeared in the same year that the first genetically modified pet, the fluorescent Glofish, went on sale, this was at least arguable; but it was widely seen as simple logic-chopping over an unfashionable shelf mark, since its author was clearly making delighted use of several tropes from a genre that had no qualms about calling itself science fiction. These ranged from the facetious punning names, which go back at least as far as Philip K Dick’s wonder drugs Can-D and Chew-Z, to the Brunneresque reductio ad absurdum of contemporary obsessions (YouTube for decapitations, an assisted-suicide livestream) and, most importantly, the freedom to concentrate on social lampoonery and world-building at the expense of character.

LikeGulliver’s Travels, from which it took an epigraph, Oryx and Crake’s effects depended as much on allegory as on entertainment: its weird science could be traced directly back to contemporary advances in genetics, while the grotesqueries of its pre-apocalypse society were clearly designed as bilious commentary on our own.

The sequel, The Year of the Flood, offered the disconcerting spectacle of an author trying to construct a plausible world out of materials seemingly designed for parody alone. Where the first book had presented the lonely adventures of the last man on Earth, the second discovered another band of eco-cultist survivors who had also dodged the plague, only to find themselves besieged by murderous escapees from a gladiatorial prison system.

This is the story that MaddAddam sets itself to continue, and the results are just as peculiar; rather as though Gulliver’s reports from Laputa and the land of the Houyhnhnms had been expanded to multivolume adventures with a love interest and a cast of sidekicks.

Like its predecessor, this last volume never quite succeeds in establishing its world as something more than an authorial toy, while Atwood’s clear interest in the interiority of her characters is persistently undercut by the parodic demands she places on the setting. What began in Oryx and Crake as excruciating black comedy is now dulled to a kind of invasive jocularity, and the barbs at current affairs are getting less and less subtle, with far-future characters reflecting incongruously on “those riots they used to show in the documentaries of the early 21st century, when kids would join phone-swarms and then break windows and mob shops” and so on.

What’s left of the satire bites hardest when it circles the exploitation of women. Where Oryx and Crake introduced us to HottTott, a globally popular child porn website, MaddAddam offers Tudor-style beheading booths that make literal the vicious incitements of 21st-century porn (“Mary Queen of Scots: Feel This Hot Red-Head Spurt!”). The genetically engineered Crakers mate by gangbang, with four “fourfathers” piling on smilingly available womenfolk, and there are horrid consequences when human females are introduced to the mix. Rape and sexual threat are the constants of this apocalypse, overtly or covertly present in every character’s backstory, and Atwood’s blank portrayal of brutalised women having to rethink the rules of subjection constitutes the troubling dark heart of MaddAddam. The rest of it seems to be having too much fun.